Williams praises Russell, Kubica roles in FW42 recovery

George Russell has already impressed Williams with his maturity amid a delay in getting the FW42 car ready for pre-season testing, with deputy team principal Claire Williams hailing the Mercedes junior driver's composed reaction to a difficult start to his Formula 1 career.

Russell will debut in F1 this year, having won GP3 and Formula 2 in he previous two seasons – a similar CV that new Ferrari man Charles Leclerc debuted with 12 months prior at Sauber.

Any excitement the 21-year-old had for the start of pre-season had to be tempered as Williams sat out the first two days of pre-season due to a delay in getting their car built.

And team boss Williams delivered a glowing report of the youngster's reaction to seeing his running limited by the crew's issues.

"It's a bit of a change for George," Williams said when asked to sum up Russell's contribution so far by GPFans.

"He knew what he was coming into, he's pretty sensible, and I've seen from George everything that I probably knew I would see.

"He's incredibly tempered and as soon as he was aware of the situation, he was incredibly calm about it and said 'when the car's here, the car's here, and we'll do our best to do what we need to do in the time that we'll have'.

"He's just again reinforced that maturity that he's got in our minds. He's delivering in every expected way."

Robert Kubica's role in Williams' development is also crucial. Not only does the Pole have an existing knowledge of the team dynamic thanks to his testing role last year, but his boss says his F1 nous remains undimmed as he prepares for a first racing campaign in nine years.

She added: "Robert, with his experience in particular in F1 and the work he was involved in with the team last year, he's incredibly capable when it comes to engineering and translating what's going on in the car and working with engineers to give them the feedback and translate that and use it for development purposes.

"They have been incredibly instrumental in the work they are doing with the engineers in order to enable the engineers to have the maximum focus on what they need to roll out, so we've been very lucky with that."

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